Veridian: Putting a Value on Values

Rakesh  Khurana; Joel  Podolny; Jaan Margus Elias

Case | HBS Case Collection | February 2006 (Revised October 2006)

Veridian: Putting a Value on Values

by Rakesh Khurana, Joel Podolny and Jaan Margus Elias

Abstract

David Langstaff, the CEO of Veridian, a defense company, struggles with the decision of selling the company. Langstaff has concerned himself with inculcalating his organization with the values necessary for superior achievement over the long term. But as a fiduciary, he had to come up with a single value to monetize the reputation the company had built. Langstaff wondered what was best for the firm and its customers and what his other options were. He also was concerned with how the prospect of selling the firm would square with Veridian's commitment to its constituencies and values-based leadership.

Keywords: Cash; Corporate Governance; Financial Markets; Law; Leadership; Patents; Values and Beliefs; Service Industry; Aerospace Industry;

Format: Print

28 pages

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Citation:

Khurana, Rakesh, Joel Podolny, and Jaan Margus Elias. "Veridian: Putting a Value on Values." Harvard Business School Case 406-028, February 2006. (Revised October 2006.)

The Still Leading case series includes an introductory note, “Still Leading (A): Issues in Transitioning to New Forms of Service Later in Life” and 10 supplementary cases that cover the transition of highly accomplished and prolific leaders (Hon. Robert McDonald, Hon. Mike Bloomberg, Gerry House, Lee Iacocca, General Claudia Kennedy, Sherry Lansing, Dr. Evelyn Murphy, Paul Newman, Hon. Colin Powell, and Louis Gossett Jr.). The Still Leading cases are part of an opening series of cases used in the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. The cases document a number of individual’s lifetime personal and professional trajectories. They focus on the nature of career processes and transitions. The materials offer an opportunity for readers to inductively reason about the structure of significant career transitions and the developmental patterns across different arenas. The cases also create a context for participants to engage in introspection by asking them to reflect on patterns of development in their own career histories.

Article | History of Political Economy | June 2017

The Social Trajectory of a Finance Professor and the Common Sense of Capital

Marion Fourcade and Rakesh Khurana

This paper traces the career of Michael Jensen, a Chicago finance PhD turned Harvard Business School professor to reveal the intellectual and social conditions that enabled the emergence and institutionalization of what we call the “neoliberal common sense of capital,” what others have called the “shareholder value” view of the American firm. Jensen's work was embraced by a generation of corporate raiders aggressively advancing new financial practices and discourses. His contribution, commonly understood as “agency theory,” was intertwined with the transformations in corporate management and governance of the last decades of the twentieth century—from the junk bond market in the 1980s to the exponential growth of CEO pay in the 1990s to the shareholder value management strategies of the 2000s. While debates about the spread of neoliberal ideas and governance tools have largely centered on the transformations of the state and international institutions or the role of actively organized intellectual networks, this essay emphasizes the importance of identifying specific carriers of particular transformations within the space of American “business discourse.”

Keywords: agency theory; corporate governance; executive pay; the firm; Michael Jensen; Neo-Liberalism; shareholder value; Agency Theory; Corporate Governance; Executive Compensation; Business and Shareholder Relations; Transformation;

Citation:

Fourcade, Marion, and Rakesh Khurana. "The Social Trajectory of a Finance Professor and the Common Sense of Capital." History of Political Economy 49, no. 2 (June 2017): 347–381. View Details

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Veridian: Putting a Value on Values

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